You have to realize that emulators, too, have shelf lives. That's especially true for ones written in pure assembly. You simply can't run them on your cell phone, and by locking a hack, you are dooming your hack to irrelevance. As soon as Windows drops backwards compatibility, just as it has done before, these fan translations and hacks will be lost forever. At that point the emulator itself becomes almost like another dead console, instead of a way to keep the old games alive.
No, this is not absolutely true. One: one can have emulator emulators that run the assembly. It is a short-visioned truth. Life of old code can and will be had again.